If you don't use an all-time cherry picked example and pick the best young player in hockey (feel free to use baseball or basketball or w/e) and then ask, if you delete 99% of the competition, would that player have been the best in the world at 16, the answer is generally "no, and it's not even close"

I don't expect someone who doesn't follow sports to know this, but I find cultures where people love this kind of "clever" reasoning, totally disconnected from any knowledge of reality, quite odd